Archive for June, 2015

Somalia’s Premier Bank To Bring ATMs, Debit Cards To Mogadishu

Via Reuters, an article on Somalia: Somalia’s Premier Bank has struck a deal with Mastercard and will issue debit cards and install ATM machines in the capital of the war-ravaged country, the Islamic lender’s top executive said on Wednesday. The east African nation has struggled for more than two decades with civil war and containing […]

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The Curious Tale Of The World-Beating Somali Shilling

Courtesy of The Financial Times, an interesting article on the Somali shilling: Here’s a pecuniary peculiarity to rival Bitcoin – the world strongest currency over the past 12 months belongs to a small, war-torn African state without foreign currency reserves or any discernible monetary policy and a central bank of only three years’ standing. Yet […]

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How Corruption Helped North Korea

Via the Carnegie Endowment, an interesting look at the role that corruption may have played in helping North Korea: “Nobody stole under Stalin,” many old-timers in the former Soviet Union like to say. Many North Koreans who remember the reign of Kim Il-sung—known as “The Great Leader,” “Sun of the Nation,” and “Generalissimo”—felt the same […]

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There’s An App For That … In Myanmar

Via The Diplomat, an interesting report on Myanmar developers who are capitalizing on a growing demand for local mobile apps: In 2004, the same year Facebook was launched by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates, an 18-year-old in Yangon was hard at work on Myanmar’s first smartphone app. Their lives couldn’t have been more different. While […]

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Bolivia’s Economic Growth

Via The World Folio, an interesting look at Bolivia’s economic growth: Bolivia has made more economic progress since President Evo Morales took office in 2006 than in all the preceding 180 years, and not just thanks to the nationalization of its extensive oil and gas resources. Despite the collapse in world hydrocarbon prices, the economy […]

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ABOUT
WILDCATS AND BLACK SHEEP
Wildcats & Black Sheep is a personal interest blog dedicated to the identification and evaluation of maverick investment opportunities arising in frontier - and, what some may consider to be, “rogue” or “black sheep” - markets around the world.

Focusing primarily on The New Seven Sisters - the largely state owned petroleum companies from the emerging world that have become key players in the oil & gas industry as identified by Carola Hoyos, Chief Energy Correspondent for The Financial Times - but spanning other nascent opportunities around the globe that may hold potential in the years ahead, Wildcats & Black Sheep is a place for the adventurous to contemplate & evaluate the emerging markets of tomorrow.